Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday April 25, 2010 @11:18AM
from the see-you-next-scheme dept.

therufus writes "A few days after the release of Assassin's Creed 2, naughty piracy sites were announcing they had cracked Ubisoft's Online Services Platform. Turns out, that wasn't entirely true. While it was possible to load into the game, players were unable to advance past a certain memory block. But now, it seems Ubisoft will need to draft a new response. A new crack has begun circulating that removes the DRM entirely."

In 2001, a developer at Insomniac wrote an article [gamasutra.com] about how they went about protecting their new Spyro game. It also took two months to be cracked. But as he says in the article, the goal was not to be unbreakable, but to delay the hackers -- 50 percent of the total sales occurred in the first 2 months.

Even unencrypted it took weeks to emulate/"crack" the protection. So this was rather successful by the standards of DRM. They can step up this kind of protection in future titles. Allegedly the new Settlers game uses a variant of the same DRM which has a more complex integration with the server. Either way, the legit customer is stuck with a game that will only run when the server is up and reachable. If you see anybody playing AC2 on a plane or even on a train, they're almost certainly playing a pirated version, because legit customers simply can't run the game.

The game's enormous contrast with other arcade games of the time created a sensation when it appeared, and was played so heavily that many machines often broke due to the strain of overuse. It was also arguably the most successful game on this medium and is aggressively sought after by collectors.

The real issue here is that SkidRow took the "values" database from the community who initially logged them, and pretty much claimed it as their own work. The original cracking community inserted some fake "values" as trackers in order to determine when anyone stole their work and released it.

One group of pirates being ripped off by another group of pirates is not an issue, it's funny.

So the pirates are winning. Look at it this way. The pirates have pushed DRM to be so draconian that even the ardent pro corporatist shill is getting stung. The only unbroken DRM out there requires you to have a 24/7 internet connection. Good luck playing your favorite single player game while you wait at the DMV, on that flight, during your commute, etc. well except for that pirate guy sitting next to you. Imagine your the guy who paid for these games in that situation. How do you feel now?

I work at Ubisoft as a programmer, which is why I'm posting as an AC. What the next step will be in the DRM, the ramp-up, is gameplay code that is run from the server. So in order to crack that one the pirates will have to fully emulate the server side code. Not the whole of the gameplay code mind you, just a small, but necessary and essential, portion. This should be in effect for the coming summer releases.For the record I think Ubisoft are being asshat idiots in continuing to ramp up this obscenity of a slap in the face to paying consumers. And I'm not alone, you should see the in-house mailing list flamewars about this (which also means that other employees are freaking greedy douchebags, it's not just the suits.)

Indeed, "I'll believe it when I see it" is not a bad position to take with OnLive.

Seriously though, it's going to take a very long time before an online system can replace a local system - think about it, current bus technologies between hardware and TV/Monitor run in the multi-gigabit range.

Now that's uncompressed, Cable TV has shown that you can crank those numbers down quite a bit, but you're still talking about a lot of people completely saturating 200-300mbit connections to match the quality of video you get on your local hardware. The connection would have to be very very reliable as well - just a few hiccups in latency or speed can cause extreme annoyance for the gamer. So in reality you're looking at probably a 500mbit connection with a guarantee of no less than 300mbit or so.

It would take one hell of an infrastructure improvement to handle that.

It's also a moving target, because video advances continue (though slower than some would like), and by the time we get 500mbit connections in enough homes to make this viable (you'll always be cutting off a big chunk of the market with this setup), the target could very well need to be 1gbit to match local hardware.

I think it's more of "I really want it, but you're a total dick, so I'll just steal it."

It's certainly not right, but it's also not un-justifiable. Given that a pirateer generally has a better gaming experience than a legitimate gamer should be illuminating.

Really, the more obtrusive these DRM schemes get the bigger the market will be for pirated copies. That's the crux of their problem.

You know a much more effective way to limit piracy? Make it more convenient to buy it than to pirate it. Valve has shown how effective this can be with Steam - they don't get nearly as much piracy on their games because it's just a lot easier to use Steam than it is to deal with cracking scheme X. Add to that the abundance of viruses disguised as game cracks, and a service like Steam becomes very attractive. Plus, with Steam Valve can react to changes in the market instantly, instead of having to wait. They can even do live testing en-mass, reducing the cost of market research. An example of that was when Valve reduced their prices on Steam and saw their revenues shoot up.

Valve pretty much has it figured out, I don't understand why nobody else seems to be catching on.

The tired old, simplistic view of "supply & demand" doesn't apply to a product that has infinite supply and basically a $0 distribution cost. The rules are different.

I see this argument in the housing market all the time too. People chant like zombies, "oh, it's supply & demand!" Without considering the multitude of factors (both real and artificial) that influence both the supply and the demand. You might as well just say "well, that's life" because it's just as insightful.

Ever wonder why we have to haggle on prices? Because motherfuckers are greedy.

There is something to what you say, of course the necessary corollary is that they are also stupid. I run into this quite a bit. A company that charges a "fair" markup on its costs will do better in the long run than a company that haggles to get every dime. It is why haggling went away for a long time in America (and elsewhere, but I am less familiar with the economics of this sort elsewhere). Quaker merchants in the colonial era sold their merchandise for what they believed to be a fair markup over their cost. Everybody knew that when you went to a Quaker merchant, you paid the same amount as the next guy no matter how good of a haggler you were. They also knew that the Quaker's markup was not excessive. Additionally, the Quaker merchants response to people who wanted to haggle was, "That's my price, if you don't want to pay it, go to somebody else." This meant that the merchants who haggled only got the customers who were good hagglers (eventually, as people who weren't good hagglers realized they were paying more than from the Quaker merchants) and therefore could not make as much money as the Quakers (or other non-Quakers who followed the same model).

The fact that prices consistently fail to fall to just about the marginal cost of production DOES, however prove that there are either very few truly healthy markets out there or that market theory is fundamentally flawed.

These people value skill and care about giving credit for it. They do not care about stealing a product while expressly leaving the credit where it's due. Their value system is contiguous and non-contradictory, hence not hypocritical.